1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to localization and/or segmentation of text in images.
2. Background Art
Existing work on text recognition has focused primarily on optical recognition of characters (called optical character recognition (OCR)) in printed and handwritten documents in answer to the great demand and market for document readers for office automation systems. These systems have attained a high degree of maturity. Further text recognition work can be found in industrial applications, most of which focus on a very narrow application field. An example is the automatic recognition of car license plates.
Proposals have been made regarding text detection in and text extraction from complex images and video. However, as can be seen from reading their descriptions, they are each non-general in some aspect. Further, some do not involve removal of the localized text from its background.
Accordingly, a need for a generalized approach of text localization and segmentation remains.